Abstract

In 1961 Paul Beeson (now Nuffield Professor of Medicine at Oxford) and I published a paper analyzing the cause, clinical course, and diagnostic clues derived from 100 patients with fever of unknown origin. The data for this paper were gathered prospectively in a medium-sized city in the northeastern United States between 1952 and 1958. In essence, we found that among 100 patients with fever of unknown origin some 40% had infections; 20%, neoplastic disease; 20%, collagen vascular disease; and 10%, a variety of entities including familial Mediterranean fever, multiple pulmonary emboli, drug fever, sarcoid, and even malingering. In 10% the